


Paradise Burning

by sicparvis87



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-07-11 14:14:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19929391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sicparvis87/pseuds/sicparvis87
Summary: Crowley and Aziraphale watch the Library of Alexandria burn to the ground. Crowley makes a promise to himself that he fails to keep.





	Paradise Burning

**Author's Note:**

> This is largely based on the TV show version but I went with the book element of Crowley grabbing the book from Aziraphale's and heading straight for Tadfield. Then just made the rest up to suit me! My first time writing for this fandom, hope it's OK!

**48BC Alexandria**

This was personal.

He didn’t know how - he  _ certainly _ couldn’t fathom why - but somehow Crawly knew this was happening because of him. A message from Hell had summoned him here but when he’d arrived, the place was already in chaos. What was he needed for? He’d resolved that maybe this was the actual message. A warning, perhaps. A threat.

He watched from the outskirts as flames licked at the buildings, smoke billowing into the sky. The inferno raged for hours, tearing its way through the city and, just when it looked like it might die down, the fire redoubled in a blaze of destruction. A helping hand from an unseen force.

Hellfire.  _ Hastur. _

The demon didn’t spend a lot of time on the surface. Maybe for the occasional temptation or to carry out specific orders from their superiors. Nothing as extravagant as this. Nothing so indulgent. But Crawly could see his sadistic signature all over it. He just didn’t understand _ why _ .

Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a lone figure standing high on a dune in the distance. Watching. Crawly had grown somewhat accustomed to that figure over the last 4000 years. But whilst he usually felt a flutter of… _ something _ …whenever he saw said figure, now there sat an uncomfortable sense of dread. Of course, it would take a whole lot more than that to keep his feet from making their way towards it, regardless.

Once he stood alongside the angel, he managed to discern why things felt off.

The stillness.

Aziraphale was not still. He fidgeted. He fussed. Emotions would flit across his face quicker than a hummingbird could flit its wings. Now he just stared.

Crawly knew his presence had been noticed, yet the angel said nothing. Aziraphale wasn’t still; he also wasn’t impolite. Even at their very first meeting, he had had the decency to ask the demon’s name (whilst still side-eying him as a matter of principal, of course).

The silence stretched taut between them. Nine times out of ten, it was Crawly who initiated their conversations, but something stayed his tongue. This was all wrong. For the first time ever, the demon felt on edge around the angel. Unwelcome. Just as he began contemplating slithering away, leaving him to his looming, Aziraphale spoke.

“Thousands of years’ worth of knowledge. All obliterated.”

His voice was so quiet. Broken. Crawly opened his mouth, closed it again, casting his gaze across the burning city. Glanced back at the angel who, Crawly realised with startling clarity, wasn’t still at all. He was positively vibrating with a kind of self-restraint the demon had never witnessed.

“I had hoped to be able to salvage  _ something _ but…”

But hellfire.

So Aziraphale instead had chosen to stand and watch the thoughtless destruction of millennia’s worth of books and documents - things he valued more than almost anything else, Crawly knew - unable to do a thing about it. After another beat, the angel finally turned to face Crawly and the demon was almost relieved to see emotion there at last. Almost, because the emotion he was faced with made him feel like he was falling all over again.

“ _ Why?” _

His voice cracked on the word and Crawly’s pointless heart tore in two. He understood it now. Why Alexandria. Why him. Why now. It  _ had _ been a warning. It had also been a frame-up.

Hell knew about their meetings. Beelzebub had spoken to him about it centuries ago, questioning his loyalties. Crawly had brushed it off easily enough. Looked pretty good on the old resume, tempting an angel to fall after all. They didn’t need to know Crawly’s real motives.

The Prince of Hell would ask for reports on his progress every once in a while. He’d send back something vague enough to keep them satisfied, to keep them off their case.  _ Yep, really working the gluttony angle here, think it can work for me. Does fancy a good treat that one,  _ he’d say. It wasn’t even a lie, in fairness.

_ Just be quick about it, _ would come the response.  _ An angel would be a big score for our master but it’s not worth sacrificing the rest of your time for. If you don’t have him soon, it will be taken out of your hands and your focus will return solely on the humans. _

It seemed his time was up.

And what better way to terminate their affiliation than destroying the embodiment of the one thing the angel held most dear on this his adopted home, making sure Crawly was in the vicinity to take the fall for it? He should have known they wouldn’t just  _ ask _ him to stop consorting. Flash bastards always had to make everything a spectacle. Go big or go to Hell. Preferably both.

He couldn’t meet Aziraphale’s imploring look. Didn’t have an answer for him that wouldn’t sound false. He was pretty sure a desperate plea of ‘it wasn’t me, you have to believe me’ would fall on deaf ears. How could it not? Demon + Hellfire...didn’t take a genius. Before he could even manage so much as a shrug, Aziraphale continued.

“Why would they do this?”

Crawly’s throat closed up, heart stuttering in his chest as his head whipped around to stare at the angel. “What?” The sound was little more than air.

“Why would they  _ do  _ this?” he asked again, waving a frantic hand at the burning landscape, brow furrowed in distress. The abrupt movement was like a soothing balm on Crawly’s fraught nerves, the sudden animation in his acquaintance putting him on more familiar ground.

He continued to stare at him, amber eyes blinking slowly as he tried to process the question. “They who?”

“The  _ demons _ ,” Aziraphale said, having the actual audacity to roll his eyes as if Crawly was the one being an idiot. As if those two words weren’t like a slap across Crawly’s face. But not like an unkind slap, no. More like one of those, ‘wake up, idiot!’ kind of slaps, you know? The kind that leaves your vision a little skewiff and your whole perception of the world just a little off kilter. That kind of slap.

“It just seems so...spiteful. I know, one shouldn’t really expect anything else, but  _ really, _ ” Aziraphale continued, worrying his hands in the folds of his robes, completely oblivious to Crawly’s inner crisis. It was only when the angel turned back to face him that he seemed to hesitate. His pale eyes widened at whatever was going on with the demon’s face before his entire being softened. “Oh, my dear boy. I  _ know _ it wasn’t you,” he said, voice so gentle and understanding yet somehow admonishing and  _ Satan _ , Crawly hated it. Hated how  _ seen _ he was by the angel. How one look into his eyes could reveal so much.

It scared him.

What scared him even more was just how much he wanted to show.

“Yeah, well,” Crawly said with a tight cough, turning his gaze back to the flames. There hadn’t been an end to that sentence. Aziraphale didn’t try to chase one.

As they stood in silence watching Alexandria and her library burn, the angel’s heart heavy and eyes downcast, Crawly made a promise to himself.

For as long as he was on this Earth, he wouldn’t let Aziraphale suffer the loss of any more of his precious books. It was the least he could do, really.

**Saturday – The Last Day of the World**

“Aziraphale!”

It was impossible.

“Aziraphale, where the Heaven are you, you idiot? I can’t find you!”

Not now, not like this. It couldn’t be.

Crowley watched as flames tore through the bookshop. Melting spines, curling pages. Ravaging every corner, every shelf. Books that he’d idly flicked through whilst waiting for the angel. Books that had oh-so-mysteriously found their way back to the bookshop after being purchased by the particularly belligerent type of customer. Books that Aziraphale had coveted and adored and cared for just as dearly (and much more kindly) as Crowley did his plants.

Gone.

Just like Aziraphale.

A torrent of water knocked the demon to the ground, dousing his panic, leaving him only with pain and rage. At Heaven, at Hell, at all of humanity. None of them had deserved him. Least of all Crowley. And now he’d failed him. Just as he’d failed to keep his promise.

His eyes caught sight of a book on the ground, the only one that seemed mostly undamaged. He scooped it up into his arms before fleeing, unable to stand being in the inferno any longer.

Another part of him wanted to sit and burn with everything else.

Instead, he climbed into his Bentley, the book in his lap. It was a prophecy book, Aziraphale’s favourites. Crowley couldn’t even muster a wry chuckle at the irony. All it did was make him remember the time he got wrapped up in trying to stop books getting burned during World War II and that one particular incident where he’d gotten word of some  _ idiot _ offering books of prophecy to a couple of Nazis. In a  _ church _ of all places.

Crowley choked back a noise. A sigh? A sob? He didn’t care, he didn’t want it. With a shaking hand, he opened the book. Aziraphale’s handwriting stared back at him. A name. An address. A map. Phone number. The fool had figured it all out. And he’d called him to try and tell him.

And Crowley had hung up on him.

A shaky exhale and then he bashed the steering wheel with his hand. Then twice more just to make himself feel better. It didn’t work so he thunked his forehead against it instead, screaming at the dashboard. The kind of scream wrenched from somewhere deep in the gut, incapable of being cut short until it was fully expended. Once out of his system, he drew himself upright, carefully retrieved another pair of sunglasses from the glove compartment, turned the key in the ignition and began making his way to Tadfield.

~*~

As Crowley sat stuck on the M25, dragging his own name through the mud, he flinched as his sunglasses were dragged from his face. The smell of sulphur and brimstone filled the car, settling thickly in the back of his throat.

“You won’t escape us, Crowley,” Hastur said, smug as ever, black eyes staring at the wall of fire in front of them. “It’s over for you. Your life here on Earth, that is,” he reiterated. “Your punishment is only just beginning.”

Hastur. The wall of fire. The memory of watching Alexandria burn to the ground, of Aziraphale watching in distress but all the while believing better of Crowley, a demon he should have thrown in with the rest of them but never did… It all broke something in him.

He started laughing.

Hastur squinted, fidgeting a little in the seat. “What’s so funny?”

He laughed harder. “You. All of you. Your petty games and your end of the world and your big war…All a waste of time.”

“Really,” Hastur said, aiming for indifference but falling short as he scrambled for the door handle the moment Crowley stepped on the accelerator, pulling out onto the hard shoulder. “Wh-what are you doing?”

“I mean, has anyone really thought this through?” Crowley continued. “Doesn’t seem like it, does it? Seems like everyone’s leaving it a bit to chance, doesn’t it? I think that’s a big mistake,” He sped up, grin widening at Hastur’s sound of distress as they approached the tidal wave of flame.

“Stop it, you’re insane! You’ll discorporate us both!”

“Just you today, I think,” he said with a wink towards the demon. “I’ve got an apocalypse to stop. Owe it to an old friend,” he added with a sneer. The flames so close he could hear them warping the bodywork of the car. He pressed the accelerator to the floor.

“I hate you!” Hastur cried as the fire consumed his corporate form, turning him to dust and ash. It was one of the most satisfying sights Crowley had ever seen.

“That’s for Alexandria!” he yelled at the empty passenger seat, knuckles turning white around the wheel, amber swallowing his eyes whole. “And for Aziraphale, you  _ fuck! _ ” he choked out.

_ Oh really, my dear, such language! _

Crowley’s mouth dropped open, eyes jumping to the rearview mirror to see, well,  _ something _ sitting in the backseat. “What the f-?!”

~*~

A Bentley shot out of the wall of flame like a bullet from a gun.

It carried on past the Met police car, still aflame and still at top speed, as the two officers watched on.

“D’you see ‘im in there?”

“Looked like he was yellin’ at someone.”

“I’d be yellin’ too if my car was on fire.”

“Looked vintage too.”

“You see that in the backseat?”

“What?”

“Dunno. Looked…I dunno.”

The officer  _ wanted _ to say it looked like a ghost. Translucent. Shimmery. Bit like that Casper fella. But more human looking. Only he was already struggling with the fireball of a car. And the raging inferno surrounding the M25. Ghosts felt like a step too far today.

“Forget it. Someone else’s problem now, eh?” he said with a shrug as the officers both turned their attention back to the blaze in front of them, munching on their sausage rolls.


End file.
